Part 7: Americannovel of naturalism                                                                      4课时

1. 教学内容：文学史导读，文学选读赏析，文学术语介绍，文学练习阐释，文学创作实践。

       (1) Stephen Crane: The Open Boat

       (2) Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie（思政融入点：资本主义社会的丛林法则）   

       (3) Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio

       (4) Jack London: The Call of the Wild

2.基本要求：了解1900—1914年期间美国自然主义文学主要特征，自然主义在表现

现实的基本原则和创作手法。

3.教学重点：通过文学阅读了解自然主义产生的社会、历史、文化背景，掌握自然主

义的精神实质、思想倾向和创作主题。

4.教学难点：从文学作品的赏析中概括美国从现实主义向悲观的现实主义，即自然主义转变

的原因，认识自然主义所关注的社会现实中肮脏的一面。

 Stephen Crane: The Open Boat

There is little cheerfulness in the work of Stephen Crane. The tone is more muted, more quietly bleak. In prose and poetry of crystalline clarity and grimly pointed power, Crane pursues his fundamental perceptions that nature is oblivious to human need, that human beings are often relentlessly selfish or blind to circumstance, and that the two moral imperatives are humility and community. The poetry has been sadly, and unjustly, neglected. Crane published two volumes of poems during his lifetime, The Black Rider (1895) and War is Kind (1900). Stylistically, they show the influence of Emily Dickinson, by whose work Crane was much impressed. In terms of substance, they express a sense of existence that is even more cast in the shadows than that of Dickinson. It is the prose work, however, that has secured Crane’s reputation. His first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), was not widely noticed when it was first published. The Red Badge of Courage(1895), however, was both a critical and a popular success when it first appeared. In a characteristically pointilliste style, Crane captures here the flux and confusion of battle. Unlike Norris, Crane preferred literary impressionism, delicacy of selection and suggestion, to saturation. He picks out carefully chosen details, intimations of color and movement, apparently disconnected images and events. He then places them in juxtaposition. The result is a fictional landscape remarkable for its instability and uncertainty. Many of the scenes are set in a foggy, misty landscape, at night or in the smoke of battle. And they offer a vivid visual equivalent for Crane’s view of war and life. “None of them knew the color of the sky,” one of Crane’s most famous short stories, “The Open Boat” (The Open Boat and Other Stories(1898)), begins. That is precisely the human fate, and the fate of the soldier: not to know “the color,” the contours or reality of the environment. Anti-heroic, the novel also denies real human agency. For “the youthful private” whose story this is – and whose name, we eventually learn, is Henry Fleming – war is a disconcerting mix of boredom, ignorance, and fear: where long periods of waiting and wondering are punctuated by bursts of action that surprise and disconcert. War is, as Crane describes it, a paradigm of 140 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 life: not least, because it is nasty, brutish, beyond personal control, and has death – in the shape of the loathsome corpse Fleming comes across amidst “a chapel made of high arching boughs” – at its center. Characteristically, Crane draws an ironic contrast between the romance and reality of battle, the heroic fate Fleming anticipates for himself and the horrible futility, the fear and the feelings of cowardice he experiences. But he also quietly propels his young protagonist towards a kind of revelation, founded on an understanding of what his true place in war, and the scheme of things, is and what that should mean for him, in terms of judgment and conduct. During his first encounter with the enemy, Fleming witnesses a mass retreat of his fellow soldiers. He also receives a head wound from the butt of a gun, when he grabs a deserter to try to find out what is happening. This, and his flight from a second encounter with the enemy, persuade him that he is no more than an insignificant part of a “vast blue demonstration.” His dreams of glory fade into a sense of absurdity, nihilism, and hopelessness. His comrades in arms may admire the “red badge of courage” on his head, but he knows that it is not his courage, but his cowardice and confusion, that has helped put it there. Fleming has swung from romanticism to nihilism. Where Crane has him end, though, is with something like a proper human response to the bleak realities of experience. Back with his regiment, after wandering lost for some time, Fleming instinctively picks up the regimental colors when they fall from the hands of another soldier during a charge forward against the enemy. The description of this event manages a delicate balance between a sense of the fated and the chosen. Equally, the account of the aftermath is poised between pride and guilt, relief and regret. The muted moral conclusion that Crane and his young protagonist arrive at is neatly imaged in a concluding description of “a golden ray of sun” breaking for a moment “through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.” Fleming, the intimation is, is “tiny but not inconsequent,” he can achieve some moral agency in and through an accurate vision of where he stands, as a soldier and a man. He takes the path of realism, understanding, and humility. As a result, “the red badge of courage” of the title assumes meanings that are both ironic and serious, for him and his creator. “Most of my prose writings,” Crane declared, “have been toward the goal partially described by that misunderstood and abused word, realism.” That word would not have been rejected, either, by Jack London, who, like Norris and Crane, saw reality as a naturalistic struggle for existence, dominated by what he termed – in one of his most famous stories, The Call of the Wild (1903) – the “law of club and fang.” For London, even more ruthlessly than for Crane or even perhaps Norris, life was a battle for power. “The ultimate unit of matter and the ultimate unit of force were the same,” the reader is informed in The Iron Heel (1908). “Power will be the arbiter,” the hero of that novel declares. “It is a struggle of classes. Just as your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so shall it be dragged down by my class, the working class.”

Preview questions:

1. Explain the term of Naturalism.

2. How does the author understand the relationship between man and nature in The Open Boat?